Album

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  In addition to all this radio broadcasts had already been sent out, police boats on the river were on the lookout for a body, and the night police reporters assigned to the various station houses had abandoned their usual poker games for what promised to be another sensation. With one result that none of them had anticipated, which was the return of Helen Wellington.

  It must have been ten o’clock in the morning when she telephoned to me from the same hotel downtown where I had found her before, and her voice was strained with excitement.

  “Can you come down right away?” she asked. “I can’t locate Jim or Herbert Dean, and I’m blithering all over the place. I suppose it’s true?”

  “Lydia Talbot has disappeared, yes.”

  “Good heavens! Lydia! Listen, Lou; I called Jim early last night, and he said Margaret Lancaster thinks her father killed Emily. Is that right?”

  “Margaret thinks that? You don’t mean it, Helen. You can’t.”

  “No, I don’t and can’t,” she said, with something of her old manner. “She may think that, but it isn’t true. I know.”

  I was in her room by half past ten, and found her still in traveling clothes and pacing the floor. She was lighting one cigarette after another, and under her make-up she was very white. She hardly greeted me at all.

  “Don’t blame poor old Jim for this,” she said. “I swore him to secrecy, but if he had any guts—but that’s neither here nor there. We split on the thing anyhow, and now with old Lydia gone he’ll never forgive me.”

  “Just what is it all about, Helen?”

  She made a gesture.

  “It’s just that I’m a plain damned fool,” she said. “Things looked black for Jim, and if they found I’d been out that night—!”

  “What night?”

  “Last Sunday night,” she said. And finally she told her story.

  She and Jim had had a difference of some sort, and she had not gone to bed. She was nervous and angry. However that might be, at one o’clock or thereabouts—she was not sure of the time—she had gone out to the refrigerator for some soda, and from there to the rear porch. It was a hot night, and for some time she had sat there on a chair staring out over the tennis court and No Man’s Land beyond it. Everything was quiet there, but suddenly she thought she saw a match lighted near the Daltons’ garage to her left; a match or a flashlight.

  It went out in a second or two, but it had interested her, and so she had left the porch and gone along the kitchen path which connects all the houses. She had just reached the end of their own shrubbery when she saw a woman coming from beside the Dalton garage. At first this woman was only a shadowy figure and she remained so until she emerged into the open. Then, by the walk and the heavy outline, Helen decided that it must be either one of our servants or—improbable as it seemed—Emily Lancaster.

  Whoever it was, she was carrying something. And whatever it was she carried, it seemed to be long and awkward to manage.

  Helen had followed her quietly. She was quite certain now that it was Emily, and her first horrified idea was that she was carrying an axe. But—and this was something not known before—as she rounded the curve of the walk near the Lancaster house itself she saw that the light was on on the kitchen porch, and that although it was Miss Emily, what she carried was a spade.

  Helen was shocked almost into immobility at the sight. To her it meant only one thing; that after all Emily Lancaster had taken the money and buried it somewhere, and was now about to dig it up. So she kept on after her, making as little noise as she could, and now and then walking along the side of the path for that reason.

  “You see how it was,” she explained. “You know the sort of heels I wear, and when I heard the news the next morning I knew I’d left a trail about two inches deep every here and there.”

  Her suspicions were confirmed when Emily passed the rear of the Lancaster house without stopping, and started on the longish path toward the Talbots’. Here was to be the direct proof that Jim was innocent, and she was both excited and thrilled. Then something happened which scared her, as she said, into a fit.

  There was someone behind them both! She slid into the shrubbery and hid there, with her heart going a million a minute. But after all it turned out to be old Mr. Lancaster, in his bare feet and a dressing gown, coming along at a half trot, and with his right hand in his dressing gown pocket. Helen had only a second or two to observe him clearly before he too left the light behind. It was long enough, however.

  “If ever I’ve seen a man mad with fury it was the old gentleman that night,” she said. “He’d always seemed a mild little man, but he was a raving lunatic just then; and Margaret’s right about one thing. There isn’t a doubt that he was out to shoot Emily. I suppose he’d been watching her ever since the murder, and that spade settled it. After all she wasn’t his daughter, and he thought she had buried the gold and then killed her mother. Well, I must say it looked like it just then.”

  Helen herself was too scared to think of anything to do. Mr. Lancaster was coming on, and ahead somewhere in the dark was Emily. She stayed in the shrubbery until he had passed, but she was not far behind him when he came to the door of the old stable which was the Talbot garage.

  For it seemed that Emily had not gone on into the waste land at all. She was inside the Talbot stable, with her spade on the floor beside her, and with a flashlight she seemed to be inspecting a corner behind a barrel. Then Helen, not far behind the old man, saw his hand come out of his pocket and saw that it held a gun.

  “It was a close thing,” she said. “I don’t think Emily ever saw me at all. I had just time to knock the thing out of his hand, and it must have gone a mile. But Emily had heard something, and the poor old thing looked up and saw her stepfather. She looked startled, and neither of them said anything for a minute. Then she braced herself and managed to speak.

  “‘I’m sorry I wakened you, father,’ she said. ‘Margaret told me tonight that my bird was dead and that George had put it here. I wanted to bury the little thing.’

  “He never replied to that at all,” Helen went on. “He looked queer, however, and I didn’t stop to look for the gun. I took him by the arm and led him back to the house and got him inside. I don’t believe he even recognized me. He seemed dazed.”

  But after she had got him back into the house—he had left the kitchen porch unlocked—and she helped him up the back stairs, he rallied somewhat. He said: “Thank you, Helen. I’m afraid I am not myself. I have been through a great deal.”

  He asked her not to waken Margaret, and if she would mind getting his pistol. But she did not leave him at once. She gave him time to get into bed, and then she went in to see if he was comfortable. She knew where Margaret kept the whiskey too, and although he protested she went downstairs and brought up the tantalus from the dining room.

  “All the time,” she said, “I was wondering what I would say if Emily came in. It would have looked pretty queer, my being there, and of course I couldn’t tell her he’d tried to shoot her.”

  But, although she had been in the house all of twenty minutes, Emily did not come back, and at last she started out to find the pistol. The old man seemed better, although according to her he still looked pretty ghastly.

  The lock was still off the kitchen door, and she left it so.

  “Well, I didn’t much care to go back,” she said. “Not with guards around the place and likely to find me on my hands and knees looking for a gun. Not to mention Emily herself! But I went. I crawled about where I thought it had fallen, but I couldn’t find it. I was pretty shaky by that time, not because I suspected any trouble but because I couldn’t think up any likely story if I was discovered. I couldn’t very well tell the police the old gentleman had tried to kill Emily, could I? And Jim in the mess up to his neck anyhow.

  “There was no sign of Emily, and no light in the Talbot garage either. I thought probably she was still out there somewhere burying her fool bird. But it wasn’t any fun, ther
e in the dark. I could see a little against the lamps on the street, but I couldn’t very well light a match, even if I’d had one. Finally I decided it had gone farther than I thought, so I tried the Talbots’ drying yard; and I found it there, by stepping on it!”

  “You hadn’t heard any shot?”

  “Never a shot, or anything else. I suppose George had been out and gone back before I got there. Anyhow the Talbot house was dark. When I got back to the old gentleman he was asleep, so I put the gun on top of his bureau and beat it. That’s the story. You can believe it or not.”

  She had been utterly incredulous when she heard of Emily’s death. Mr. Lancaster could not have killed her. He was asleep and breathing stertorously when she left him. After that she began to worry. Explain as she might, that story of hers had nothing to support it but her bare word; and not only was Mr. Lancaster beyond interrogation, but it seemed dreadful to her to tell of a dying man that he had made that irrational attempt on Emily’s life.

  “I simply decided to keep my mouth shut,” was the way she put it.

  Just when she realized that Jim knew something she was not certain. He was queer all of Monday and Monday night. She would find him gazing at her, and then looking away quickly before she could catch his eye. He drank quite a little that day, too. She found herself watching him also; and it became a rather dreadful game according to her. For by Monday night each of them was suspecting the other of what she called “something.”

  It was not so irrational as it sounded, she said. If Jim knew that she had been out on Sunday night, then he too might have been out of the house. He might have slipped out after her and returned before she did.

  “Of course it was crazy,” she explained, “but I wasn’t normal, any more than the rest of you along the Crescent. There’s a queer streak in the Talbots, too, and his mother was a Talbot. I began to wonder if he had it. You know his uncle ran away with a woman years ago and then up and shot her one day. I knew that, because Jim has wondered lately if the old boy had come back and was trying to exterminate a lot of people he didn’t like.”

  By Monday night she had worked herself into a modified sort of hysteria. That was when she had walked into our house and said what she had said. But after the attack on me Jim’s nerves had given way entirely, and they had a rather dreadful scene after she left me on Thursday where each accused the other of all sorts of unnamed crimes.

  When she had jerked open the door to leave the room she found their new butler in the hall outside, and knew that he had been listening. After that she simply threw some things in a bag and escaped.

  The night before she had weakened and called Jim. She had had time to think.

  “You have time to think in the country,” she said, lighting a cigarette and forcing a grin. “There’s nothing else to do. And if Jim suspected me it suddenly dawned on my weakened brain that he couldn’t have done it himself! He’d heard of Margaret’s statement from Bert Dean, and he was sorry as hell and quite decent. But what am I to do, Lou? If I tell, won’t they come down on Jim again? And I can’t locate Herbert Dean anyhow.”

  I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I took her firmly by the arm and into the elevator, and half an hour later she was telling her story to the Police Commissioner, who beyond a tendency to scratch now and then had apparently overcome the poison ivy.

  Chapter XLII

  THAT WAS ON SATURDAY, August the twenty-seventh. The reign of terror had extended over nine days, and there was talk about evacuating the Crescent to save further killings. Two or three timorous families on Euclid Street behind us had already moved themselves, their children and their family pets to remote spots in the country. Even the Avenue in our neighborhood was largely deserted at night, the press was screaming about the homicidal maniac who was still at large, and one tabloid having exhausted all other resources, dug up from an unknown source the old story of John Talbot and his love affair, with its tragic ending. From that moment the search for Mr. Talbot was almost as intensive as that for Lydia herself.

  Mr. Lancaster was buried that afternoon, police reserves having been called out to control the crowds around the gate and elsewhere; and a half dozen motorcycle men escorting the body to and keeping the cemetery clear. I had flatly refused to go there, much to Mother’s indignation.

  “I had never thought that a daughter of mine,” she said, “would be found failing in respect to the dead.”

  “I am not going, mother.”

  “Is that any way to speak to me, Louisa? Really, sometimes I wonder if all this trouble hasn’t done something very strange to you.”

  “I’m afraid it has, mother.”

  She whirled from where she was standing in front of her mirror, pinning on her hat with its long dull-beaded black pins.

  “Just what do you mean by that?” she demanded.

  “I suppose,” I said carefully, “it has taught me my right to live while I can. To live my own life, not yours, mother. Not anyone’s but mine. My own.”

  She stared at me with incredulous eyes.

  “And that to me, from my own child! All I have left, after years of sacrifice for her!”

  “Just what have you sacrificed, mother?” I said, as gently as I could. “Haven’t I been the sacrifice? Isn’t this whole Crescent a monument to the sacrifice of some one or other? And to what? To security? Then where is it? To how things look? They don’t look so well just now, do they? If you believe in either one or the other you might look out the window!”

  She made no answer to that. She gathered up her dull black bag, straightened the folds of her mourning veil, and went to the door. There she stopped and turned.

  “I would like to know,” she said bitterly, “if Doctor Armstrong has put these—these outrageous notions into your head.”

  “No,” I told her. “It was someone else, and if he ever asks me to marry him I shall do so.”

  I doubt if she heard much of the funeral service that day. I know that when she returned she locked herself into her bedroom, and that she did not speak to me again for twenty-four hours. But as those twenty-four hours were filled with excitement I am afraid I felt this punishment less than I should.

  There had been no sign whatever of Lydia Talbot through all of Saturday. Downtown in the District Attorney’s office Helen was being examined on her story of Emily Lancaster’s last night, with the usual group about her, and the only result the complete destruction of Margaret’s theory. And, although no one knew this at the time, Herbert Dean had spent at least a part of the day going from one hairdresser to another, carrying a photograph with him. The remainder of the time, or some portion of it, he spent in a lodging house on a narrow street behind the hospital; the address of which he had obtained, not without difficulty, from the blotter he had taken from Emily Lancaster’s desk in the MacMullen house.

  There, as I know now, he got permission from a reluctant landlady to examine a small furnished room, extremely tidy, but from which all traces of its recent occupant had been taken the night before. Except for the books. The room was almost filled with books.

  “Must have been quite a reader.”

  “Yes, sir. He didn’t do much else. I was sorry to lose him. He’d been here ten years.”

  “Is he sending for these books?”

  “Well, now, that’s funny for a man as fond of them as he was. They were like his children in a way, if you know what I mean. But he said I was to give them to the library. He wouldn’t need them again.”

  The net result of all this being that a puzzled and irritated Commissioner of Police was that afternoon asked for another guard, this time to watch the house behind the library; was also requested to issue a general alarm for one Robert Daniels, street cleaner to the Department of Public Works; and was left to read and study a mass of aged and not too clean clippings from a city in an adjoining state.

  “What’s the big idea, Dean?” he demanded. “If you think this fellow Daniels is the killer, why don’t you s
ay so?”

  “I haven’t any idea that he is the killer,” Dean replied soberly. “What I want to do is to save his life.”

  But on the Crescent we still remained in ignorance of all this. The only news I had was that Lizzie, from the Talbots’, had not returned from Mr. Lancaster’s funeral. That came to me at my lonely dinner, via Annie and the grapevine telegraph, and lost nothing in the telling.

  Briefly, Lizzie had been acting in a strange manner all week. She had eaten scarcely anything, and had been so hard to get along with that she and Mrs. Talbot had had a frightful fuss early that day. The whole house had heard it, and no one had been greatly surprised when Lizzie at once went to her room and packed her old-fashioned valise. They were surprised, however, to see her come out to the servants’ car—it is our custom on such occasions to supply our domestics with transportation—and to drive quietly enough to the cemetery. The valise she placed in front, beside the driver.

  It was not until the return journey that she spoke at all, and then it was only to the chauffeur. She reached through the window in front of her and touched him on the shoulder.

  “I’ll get out here,” she said.

  Some one of the women tried to say good-bye to her, but she paid no attention; and the last they saw of her she was standing with her valise at her feet and apparently waiting for an interurban car.

  “Well, we understood well enough, miss,” Annie said. “Her sister’s got a farm out near Hollytree. But to go off like that, with all of us knowing her for years—well, I suppose she felt pretty bad, with one thing and another. I’m not one to hold a grudge against her.”

  It seemed natural enough to me, knowing Lizzie’s dour manner. During all my early years she had terrified me. She had beaten George within an inch of his life when he had frightened me with the dumbwaiter, and had then taken the black and some of the skin off his nose with sapolio. And she had smacked me soundly once when she found me in the Talbot stable trying to smoke a seedpod from their Indian cigar tree. A hard dauntless woman, Lizzie, whose other name I have never even heard up to that time, and whose jet-black dyed hair was as familiar to me as the ancient cameo pin with which she pinned her high collar.